Inside the Sound

The Sound of Music

Every dot is one broadcast play. Plays of the same song land on the same spot: the sound acts like a fingerprint.

The audio finding began in routine tests of how POP Scores settle. One reference station stood out: its songs also sounded much more alike.

Each square compares two genres by sound. Darker means more alike. The same scale is used for all three stations.

Dance UK, an electronic dance station from Birmingham, gave the hardest test. When most songs sound alike, even a 200-dimensional audio fingerprint has less to tell apart. Yet the association with listener hold still appeared.

Then the sound started to point somewhere.

On The Big 80s in New York, the sound associated with stronger listener hold leans British: new wave and British rock rather than their American counterparts. The station's audio core leans British too.

There is something historically familiar about that: the Second British Invasion, still audible in the core of an American 80s station four decades later.

The Audio page contains the control tests, methodology and limits.